


West Virginia Winter

by Potato_Being



Series: 76 [1]
Category: Fallout 76
Genre: Gen, Isolation, Winter, background cryptids, cannibalism for survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:46:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28803030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potato_Being/pseuds/Potato_Being
Summary: The remnants of Appalachia are picked clean when Jackaby emerges, and with only a few months till the weather gets cold and winter sets in, he needs to prepare fast.Then his supplies run out in the middle of January. He's not proud of the actions he takes.
Series: 76 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2111760





	West Virginia Winter

**Author's Note:**

> if ao3 doesn't have the incredibly specific tags you need, homemade is fine  
> tagging as graphic violence because there's butchering of a human body, but other than that it's just a guy living completely alone in the remnants of his former home

When he was younger, Jackaby would stare out the window in a trance as he watched the snow fall. He hadn’t understood what a chore it was for his family, how the old wood stove struggled to heat the house, the risk of a tree coming down on the power lines, leaving them in darkness. He saw it as beautiful and fun, and a chance to explore the woods in a new way. His grandmother would bundle him up, make sure he’d be warm enough, and he’d run off outside, creating fresh tracks as he looked for signs of animal movements.

Now though, he has to think through supplies for the winter, how much wood is needed to heat the house, and how to clean the chimney that hasn’t seen use for over a decade. It’s simple enough to pile the split logs where they’ll be dry and protected, to figure out how much fuel the stove needs, to clean out the chimney. Those parts are easy, because it doesn’t involve mold. The food supply does.  
He digs through the ruins of towns, packing the pre-War food away in the pantry, up on the shelves where the mice can’t reach. It doesn’t spoil, so it’ll be their last resort. He catches fish, hauling them back to cook, salt, and dry. Most of the plants he harvests can be fermented, so he makes alcohol. Honey he steals from hives, running in terror from the honeybeasts that give chase.

He needs more time to fully prepare, but he doesn’t have it. They emerged in September, and the weather’s already getting cold. He watches the wildlife vanish as well, hiding away or migrating for the approaching winter.

The first frost hits in mid-October. He wakes up in the dark, shivering as he sees ice patterns climbing the windows. He runs downstairs, making sure his hands are steady as he builds the fire in the stove. As it burns brighter and stays strong he relaxes, closing the gate and just sitting in front of it, watching the flames. He did the same thing when he was little. If he woke up cold he’d go downstairs and stoke the fire, and then sit and watch it. It felt safe.

The food supplies are beginning to run low. Some of it is his fault, he didn’t preserve the fish as well as he could have, and they began to rot. Some of it isn’t his fault, like how the mice reached one of the lower shelves and chewed through a month’s worth of boxed food.  
The winter gets colder. He watches the clouds roll in around noon, and the first chunks of ice fall a few hours after that. He can hear it hitting the roof, and can see the tree branches around the house begin to bow. He drags bedding downstairs next to the stove, in case one of those branches breaks overnight.

He wakes up to a mercifully undamaged house, but a mess of a yard. A thick coat of ice covers everything, and entire trees snapped into pieces under the ice’s weight. He takes a breath and begins planning what he’ll need to do when it thaws.  
It doesn’t thaw. The temperature stays below freezing for a week. Jack is able to spend that week patching holes in the house, and putting up curtains made from unusable blankets to keep it just a bit warmer.

For the first time he feels nervous looking out at the forest. No, when he stops to think about it, it’s not the first time. The last time was in the dead of winter as well, but he wasn’t alone.  
This time he is.  
It doesn’t feel like he’s trespassing, or there’s something very wrong with the area. It’s not that, it’s that when the sun is going down, he can see something wandering through the woods just far enough away that he can’t tell what it is. Deep down, he knows he’s safe. As long as he’s in the house, as long as he doesn’t go into the woods, he’ll be safe.

His food runs out in late January. He has to leave and find more. He heads out early, just as the sun begins rising, rifle on his back as he picks his way down the steep road, looking for anything alive. Even the birds have left, and his trek down to the highway is silent save his own footsteps.  
The town he walks to has been picked clean, whether by him or by other dwellers he’s not sure. He could eat bark, for however long that could last.  
As he’s beginning to head home to strip bark from trees he finds an alternative. Half-submerged in the river is the frozen corpse of another dweller. He looks down at it, not recognizing the face, only the jumpsuit he’s long since abandoned. They must have slipped and fallen in, and the cold did the rest.  
It’s a dark thought that hangs in his head as he grabs the body and begins dragging it back up the mountain. He knows it’s taboo for a reason. But meat is meat, and he has to survive the winter somehow, right?

He butchers the body on the table outside the same way he watched his mom butcher a doe. Removing the organs, the head, careful not to puncture anything and infect the meat. Pulling the limbs off, making manageable cuts of flesh. He’s not sure what kind of cuts a person could even have, he’s sure there’s no sirloin or shank here.   
He takes the discarded parts deep into the woods, burying them in snow. If the ground wasn’t frozen he’d bury them. He takes the meat inside, and begins cooking. He makes a stew with a package of freeze dried vegetables and an arm, coupled with some carrots he’d saved. Enough food for a few days. Enough time to walk to Clarksburg and check for food there. He sits on the floor and has a bowl of stew and a beer.

The town is mostly picked over, but he finds a back room that hadn’t been broken into yet. There are boxes of cram, blamco, and cans of diced tomatoes, all of which he grabs and hauls back home.  
Meaty macaroni and cheese is pretty good.

He doesn’t like how quickly this has become normal.


End file.
